Rereading The River Ophelia in the era of #MeToo

When published in 1995, Justine Ettler’s debut novel The River Ophelia received a lively critical reception. For some, the book exemplified a genre of gritty, in-ya-face writing then known as ‘grunge lit’, named after the contemporaneous music movement from Seattle (think Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam).

In October 2017, after some years out of print, The River Ophelia was republished, and it’s a novel worth re-examining during this moment of #MeToo, because it has significance beyond the ‘grunge lit’ classification. Set in inner-city Sydney, the novel focuses on a sexually violent relationship between literary studies student Justine and misogynist Playboy reporter Sade.

Justine stalks Sade, obsesses over him, and subjects herself to his mental and physical cruelty. At one point, she asks rhetorically:

Why don’t I leave him? How can I still love him? What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I see this for what it is? … I cry even harder. Nothing can help me. Not feminism, not psychoanalysis. I’m never going to be happy. I’m never going to believe I can be happy. I’m never going to be in control of my life.

In fact, Justine does see her relationship with Sade ‘for what is is’: degrading. Dehumanising. She’s aware of how feminists have critiqued male violence. Nonetheless, Justine seems unwilling or unable to abandon her pernicious paramour.

Writing in Australian Book Review after Ophelia was first published, Don Anderson described Ettler as ‘Sydney’s Empress of Grunge’. Anderson was one of several writers to align Ophelia with the ‘grunge lit’ genre – a genre comprised of novels that were published during the mid-1990s by ‘young’ (late twenties to early thirties) Australian authors such as Ettler and Christos Tsiolkas, and that featured protagonists within that age group. The protagonists led lives characterised by drug use, rough sex and perpetual ennui.

At the time, Ophelia’s publishers evidently saw the commercial viability in the grunge tag: the ‘Empress of Grunge’ quote appears on the back cover of my 1995 edition. The front cover features a grainy black-and-white shot of a naked woman with her head between her legs. This shot is accompanied by the tagline ‘an uncompromising love story’.

Ophelia’s republication in 2017 might seem like an appeal to ’90s nostalgia. But actually, the book has a greater significance, as suggested on its Pronoun.com page, where the novel is described as ‘a dark anti-romance’ and ‘a postmodern account of domestic violence’. The page contains a shot of the new edition’s cover: sombre black background, red and white lettering, and a shot of long hair.

This repackaging or reframing of Ophelia is important for a few reasons. First, the anti-romance’ tag hints at the novel’s critique of male violence in a way that ‘uncompromising love story’ never could. Then there’s the new cover design, which alerts readers to the fact that this will be a bleak read, indeed. There’s none of the stylised, soft focus titillation invoked by the initial cover.

We’re also advised that this is a novel about domestic violence. Like many who have experienced domestic violence in real-life, Justine is conscious of and appalled by her partner’s cruelty, but nonetheless keeps returning to him. Justine’s friend, Ophelia, sums up the dynamic at the heart of this relationship:

The thing is … the thing about all this pain (women) go through, all this love that just hurts all the time, the thing about all this pain is that it’s really exquisite. It’s exquisite pain. That’s what makes us keep going back for more.

Throughout the novel, this ‘exquisite pain’ is described in the same dispassionate manner that one might describe a trip to the supermarket. Justine has, it seems, resigned herself to being the object, not the subject, of her sexual encounters. She has resigned herself to having no agency.

Which is why Ophelia’s importance also lies in the timing of its republication, which coincides with the rise of #MeToo. The women who have publicly spoken about experiences of abuse and assault under this title have collectively contested the myth that men’s violence against women is rare, trivial and ignorable.

The shining of a spotlight on male violence and gender inequality that is crucial to #Me Too is also crucial to The River Ophelia. In the spirit of ‘postmodern’ novelists such as Kathy Acker, Ettler reworks canonical literary texts in order to highlight their (frequently dubious) sexual politics. Her novel’s characters include the Marquis de Sade’s Justine and Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Even though these women live in the apparently woman-friendly 90s, they’re still miserable as ever. The Justine and Ophelia of 1995 are still suffering at the hands of shitty men.

My point is that to classify The River Ophelia as ‘grunge lit’ and leave it there does the novel a disservice. Ettler’s novel provides an unflinching examination of male violence – an issue that is as depressingly pervasive in the #MeToo era as it was in de Sade’s day.

Image: crop from 1995 cover of The River Ophelia.

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Dr Jay Daniel Thompson lectures in media writing in the Media and Communications program, School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He is also a freelance journalist, blogger and editor.

Comments

Thanks for this piece, Jay. The republication of this novel comes as no surprise to me. I suggested its inclusion in a CW course that I teach a few years ago, given it ticks a number of literary boxes that I needed to bundle into one lecture: it’s postmodern in that it explicitly borrows from other texts (as pointed out), it’s transgressive, and it also exemplifies some of the aims of ecriture feminine (‘writing the body’) as proposed by Cixous. And bonus, it’s by an Australian female author. The text presents interesting questions about how women (and men, and trans and gender-fluid people) can write about power, sex, relationships, and the body (the diarrhea scene always gets a reaction) and whether writing with visceral, cringe-worthy honesty about these things is an exercise, no matter how debasing, in empowerment. Or not. I like to pose the question whether students think the The River Ophelia is a ‘feminist text’ (the consensus is generally ‘no’), but that doesn’t seem to be the point of it. Some of the best creative writing I’ve seen from students at an undergrad level has come from their creative responses to this text. The sanitised, pretty imagery CW 101 writing falls away and something else emerges that is ‘gritty’, honest and compelling.

Thanks, Melanie, for your kind words. I’m so glad to hear that your students benefited from reading TRO. I’m pleased, too, that this book continues to be read and taught, all these years later.I hope the republication generates a new wave of interest in Ettler’s text.

And yes, TRO engages with a range of post-structuralist perspectives on women, the body, writing. This engagement tended to be overlooked in the book’s critical reception, which focused on the more salacious aspects, and on the ‘grunge’ label.

It did, you’re right. It got slapped with the ‘grunge’ label and put in literary box with Tsiolkas, Andrew McGahan, Linda Jarvin, etc (which the writers themselves did not identify with) and that was kind of the extent of any real critique of text. Here’s hoping for a TRO revival then and some retrospective critical analysis of Ettler’s work (in the age of #metoo).

Gee, I wonder how much dick Ettler was forced to suck at Pan Macmillan, or Pronoun, to get her book published? I vomit on your professional opinions, especially if you can not distinguish between Kathy Acker on the one hand and Ettler, Carter and the love letters of James Joyce on the other.